


a lone king

by nasri



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-02-24 22:11:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2598254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasri/pseuds/nasri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock ties a tourniquet around the base of his arm, medical grade, pinching white rubber, and looks at Mycroft like he can see the planets through his eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not terribly happy with this, rushed and riddled with errors. It’s been one of those days.

The world begins and ends with him. He is the God Particle, unstable and decaying but with his hands he can create the beauty of Eden and the sin of Gomorrah. Sherlock ties a tourniquet around the base of his arm, medical grade, pinching white rubber, and looks at Mycroft like he can see the planets through his eyes. He is rubbing the path of his vein with the base of his thumb, and Mycroft can feel the blood in his body stutter and stall, his fingers go numb as Sherlock’s mouth falls open at the pinch of a needle.

He never stops looking, watching with his stunning blue eyes and Mycroft can’t tear himself away. He sees the very moment it hits him, the way his cheeks flush and his eyes roll in pleasure—a supernova, blotting out the whole of the universe until it fades to dusk and ruin.

“Mycroft,” he whispers, like a prayer as his head hits the wall with his throat bared, his mouth too dry to swallow. Sherlock’s fingers reach for him, though he’s still frozen in the doorway, leaning heavily against the wood, sagging under the weight of his indecision.

“What are you doing?” He asks, unable to keep the desperation from his voice.

Sherlock’s body sinks weightless against the floor, he moans breathlessly, eyeing an invisible halo, wishing for wings. It’s the one thing Mycroft can never understand, this terrible compulsion, a black hole to the glowing constellation of his brother’s psyche. Growing up they were Gemini, one in the same, until Sherlock, like Castor, fell far beyond his grasp. Pollux bargained for his brother, but Mycroft is a coward.

“You’ve never felt it,” Sherlock smiles with unfocused eyes, watching him with something akin to sympathy. “You won’t know, you won’t understand what it’s like.”

Mycroft feels torn between the numbness in his fingers and the acid clawing its way up his esophagus. Sherlock laughs. “Yes, that’s it. You’re getting there.”

“I need to go,” he manages, feeling for all the world like a drowning man with no sight of the shore.

“It’s okay,” Sherlock breathes, his eyes sliding closed in beautiful tempo with the shuttering fall of his chest. “I’m running too.”

—

Sherlock has never been careful, because Mycroft has never required it of him. As a child he would take the blame for broken vases and torn books, a crime his mother would punish just as readily as Sherlock’s destructive touch for ever daring to lie to her. It never stopped him trying.

“Excuse me, Mister Holmes,” the formalities fall unfamiliar from Lestrade’s lips. He is a not a polite man, or a particularly tactful one, but his barred teeth and sense of duty make up for his rough edges. “Your brother is an addict. This is the fifth time I’ve seen him in here, and I know for a fact there’s no record with his name on it.”

Sherlock watches from behind half lidded eyes, his head tilted back against the cool wall of his holding cell, a lazy smile stretched across his lips. It looks like a challenge, one Mycroft will not rise to. “I haven’t a clue what you’re referring to, Mister-” he pauses, making a show of inclining his head just as he growls “Lestrade” from between clenched teeth.

“Lestrade, of course. Apologies.”  

“This is terrible, this is.” He says, turning to Sherlock. “Is he what you deal with at home?”

Sherlock’s laugh sounds choked from disuse, but it still rings like the wind to Mycroft’s ears. “Oh detective,” he sighs, “you and I will get along well.”

“No, I don’t think we will.” He turns back to Mycroft. “You’re scrapping this report over my dead body, mate. If you want your kid brother to get away with possession then teach him how not to get caught.”

“That’s an awful lot of effort,” Sherlock reminds him. “Mycroft doesn’t appreciate legwork.” He eyes him like a shadow, something elongated, distorted, difficult to make out. “Write me up, Lestrade.” He catches Mycroft’s glare, and smiles. “Teach me a lesson.”

An hour and a mandatory court date later, Mycroft signs for Sherlock’s release. His brother only shakes his head, curls weighed down by six weeks of growth, greasy and matted, hitting just below his jawbone, little swathes of shadow against his pale skin.

“No thank you,” he says, so Lestrade laughs, locks the door behind him, and usher’s Mycroft down the front steps. “You can try again tomorrow.”

—

“I could show you the most amazing things,” Sherlock whispers through the bars of the holding cell, his legs propped up against the wall, curled fingers brushing against the floor. He is sweating through his clothes as chills wrack his body, revolting against the natural balance restored to his blood stream.

“Yeah, pretty sure that’s a crime.” Sherlock blinks lazily, so Lestrade continues. “Propositioning a police officer.”

“Oh I was referring to heroin,” he admits causing Lestrade to snort with laughter.

“Great, thanks for clarifying.”

“Your wife’s cheating on you,” Sherlock says, fingering an indent in the stone floor.

“I know.”

“I’m in love with my brother,” he continues, his tone somewhat bemused, as if he’s just worked it out, the root of his dark, rotting heart.

“Of the two of us, I’d say you have it worse then.”

“I think I’m ready to go,” he says, unfurling from the bench and forcing his body to respond, to stand and step and make it to the door without collapsing in on himself.

“I’ll see you soon.” Lestrade watches with folded arms and the knowing scowl of a pessimist with a police badge.

—

Sherlock crawls into Mycroft’s bed with muddied shoes and the breath of the Devil as he whispers into his ear. He was awake the moment Sherlock swung open his Nightingale door, his silhouette inhuman against the wall.

“You didn’t come back,” he says, his fingers tight around Mycroft’s wrist, cutting off his circulation, biting into his skin with jagged, blackened fingernails. He doesn’t answer, so Sherlock continues his assault on his veins; pressing, pushing, tracing with cold, unsteady fingers.

“I’m going to shoot up again,” he says. “I can take you with me.” Mycroft cannot find the voice to deny him nor the will to encourage him, so Sherlock reaches for the crumpled, plastic grocery bag he had left on the floor, and slides from the bed, leaving a smear of mud across his duvet.

He retreats to the kitchen, soundless against all but the creak of his stairs, and when he returns it is with bitten lips and two cooling syringes of opaque, yellow liquid. “Cut with vitamin B,” Sherlock says, “with pre-wrapped syringes.” Like Mycroft needs convincing, like he’s ever needed convincing when Sherlock opens his mouth to pull taught the golden thread that controls his every move.

“It’ll be warm,” he says, straddling Mycroft’s hips, breathing into his hair. “But not too hot.” Mycroft closes his eyes at the feeling of a rubber tourniquet but he doesn’t pull away. It could be aluminum phosphide, rat poison in those needles, and he would only look to Sherlock’s glassy eyes for salvation. Sherlock presses his lips just below the crook of his elbow, and slides the needle through his skin with a look of reverence. Mycroft watches as Sherlock tugs off his tourniquet and wraps it around his own arm, flexing and stretching until his vein is raised and visible. “Count to thirty,” he says, brushing a stray lock of hair from Mycroft’s temple.

Mycroft loses himself at twenty three, and Sherlocks hands are pressed to his chest, digging through his ribcage, searching for his heart. He comes back empty handed, and Mycroft holds his bloodied fingers to his lips. “Can’t you see?” He asks, and Mycroft nods, pupils blown in ecstasy as Sherlock burns a path down his thigh.

The universe expands behind him, a shroud of darkness broken by the meteor shower of Sherlock’s lips against his eyelids. Mycroft intwines their fingers until they are indivisible. “You can’t imagine what it’s like,” Sherlock breathes.

“Can’t I?”

“No.” Mycroft wants to argue, wants to insist that it was Sherlock who left him, Sherlock who needed independence and experiments and friends. Mycroft’s worldly desires have always been limited to the pads of his brother’s fingertips, the delicate curve of his wrist bone. Sherlock groans as Mycroft runs his lips over every notch in his spine, traces protruding ribs, grasps his hips to keep them grounded. Mycroft sighs because he feels it too, like touch magnified, a world without oxygen.

The room is spinning as Sherlock whispers, “It’s not the same. I know because you’ve never resorted to this, you never had to run like I have.” His fingers dig into the black remnants of a needle mark, bruised and surprisingly sore in a way that makes Mycroft gasp, wide eyed and staring. A single drop of blood dried in whorls across the crook of his elbow, and Sherlock lowers his head to lick it away with the flat of his tongue.

“I would bleed you dry if I could,” he admits and Mycroft tries to smile.

“I would let you.”

—

Mycroft enters Lestrade’s office dressed in his usual three piece suit, tweed this time, to stave off the chill that he can’t quite shake. He spent the morning coming down in his en suite, with Sherlock curled inside the empty bathtub, watching him with blackened eyes.

“You allowed Sherlock to leave-”

“Totally within my rights,” Lestrade says, without looking up from his report.

“Not if he was displaying behavior that implied adequate risk.” There is a buzzing, distant but growing, and he shakes his head just a fraction in an attempt to ward it off. It only gets louder.

“To himself or others,” Lestrade mimics. “I am a copper, thanks, I know protocol.” He looks up then, eyes traveling the expanse of his body. “I don’t consider him to be a danger to others, though I didn’t include you in that.” He stands, throwing Mycroft off his equilibrium, forcing him to take a step back. The buzzing is deafening as Lestrade plants his hands on the desk in front of him.

“You need some help, mate. He’ll take you apart if you let him.” Of course he’ll let him, of course.

“Good day, Inspector.”

He is nearly to the hallway, legs aching, when Lestrade stops him with a soft huff of breath. “Take the day off, Holmes. It’s not going to wear off in a few hours, actually it’ll be closer to a few days. Just-” he sighs, and runs a hand through his stocky, graying hair. “Remember how this afternoon feels, when he comes back tonight.”

Mycroft doesn’t respond, doesn’t even acknowledge him but for the tensing of his shoulders before he walks out the door.

—

Mycroft does not take the day off, though Sherlock does return minutes before one in the morning, sighing into Mycroft’s pillow. He knows better than to feign sleep, he has been up and restless for hours, a mixture of hunger and nausea doing nothing to abate the blood that seems to have turned to tar in his veins, resisting the clench of his heart, smearing shut ventricles and blocking arteries. Sherlock’s pupils are pinpricks against sea glass and Mycroft knows he is alone.

“I didn’t bring any with me,” he said, his fingers skittering fractal patterns against the skin of his forearm. “It was just once.”

“You do this every day?” He asks, holding Sherlock’s erratic pulse, his delicate, hollowed wrist to his lips.

“Not all. Most.”

Three days have gone by in such a slow progression of hours. Three days since he was forced to come to terms with his wayward brother’s bad habits, watching as he lay across a filthy linoleum floor injecting rocket fuel through his veins. Mycroft has always managed life with a carefully detached sense of the inevitable, which makes him so valuable in government work. But now, suddenly, for three painful days, slowed to single frame releases, he has lived life like Sherlock does. With something bitter and decaying in the pit of his stomach, the remnants of a dream he can’t possibly achieve, festering beneath layers of transparent skin. It wasn’t the universe Sherlock wanted him to see, it was this.

“What can I do?” He asks.

Sherlock watches him, holds his breath, so Mycroft does the same until he feels his chest collapse against his side. He breathes him in, like oxygen, like carbon monoxide.

“Will you kiss me?” Mycroft cannot deny him anything, so he presses their lips together in an attempt to save them both. He never had much of his brother’s addictive personality, but once he feels those lips part against his Mycroft is sure he will never tear himself away. This, he will crave until his dying day, like Sherlock after his first hit of heroin (with cocaine he likes to think he had a chance.) Sherlock groans into his mouth, a mixture of surprise and drug induced ecstasy and Mycroft feels it vibrate down to his own vocal cords, only to be returned just a note more desperate. Sherlock’s hands are fisted in his dressing gown, pulling him closer with every intent to devour and when he bites down on his lip it draws blood.

“This won’t fix anything,” Sherlock tells him, cupping his face in his hands. “I love you so much and this doesn’t fix anything.”

—

Sometimes Mycroft wakes in the middle of the night to a damp room and a warm body curled beside him in bed. Sherlock so rarely sleeps, but when he does it is unmoving, undisturbed. He wonders sometimes, if perhaps they did this backwards, if he was meant to wake with seven year old Sherlock tucked against his side, instead of this twenty-six year old man, starved thin and sallow, unrecognisable. But Sherlock never did crawl into his bed when they were children, for he feared little— not the creaky pipes that sang above his bedroom, not the florescent depths of his imagination. For a short time, when he was old enough to stumble through books on astronomy, Sherlock feared the sun.

“What will happen to us when it runs out of energy?” He asked, aiming for curious but just barely skirting the edge of anxiety.

Never having held much stock in lying to children, Mycroft answered “you will be long dead by the time that happens.”

“You too?” As if Mycroft could outlive Gods in Sherlock’s mind.

“Of course.”

“Alright,” he said, sounding relieved. He never brought it up again.

Mycroft wonders what it is that Sherlock is so afraid of. He remembers him as fearless, sure of himself, taking solace in biology and chemistry, equations that could be balanced with the same, unchanging formula, and the evolution of a species that will never stagnate. Sometimes he thinks of asking him, but when he rolls over, smelling of vinegar and smoke, his hands tucked beneath Mycroft’s only pillow, he somehow always thinks better of it.  

—

“This is not my problem,” Lestrade says, as he pours watery black coffee into a chipped mug stained brown from decades of over steeped tea. Mycroft watches him and doesn’t say a word. “It’s not even on the spectrum of being my problem.” He pushes the mug across the desk, wiping up the splatter of spilled coffee with his shirt sleeve while Mycroft watches with distaste. “I honestly shouldn’t even care.”

“And yet here I am.” Mycroft makes no move towards the cup, Lestrade doesn’t seem to notice.

“Here you are,” he repeats, looking slightly defeated, slumped in his cheap, ill-fitting charcoal grey suit. Sherlock has the tendency to render people defenseless in a world of tidal waves and expectations.

“I never asked that you look after my brother, I know very well how difficult that task can be.”

“Especially when your preferred strategy is letting him do whatever the fuck he wants.” Lestrade winces. “Look, I don’t-”

“I didn’t deny it,” he says softly, and it makes Lestrade look away, pinching the skin between his eyes, drawing his lips back into a grimace.

“I don’t even know where to begin.” He runs a hand over his jaw. “Your brother is a dime a dozen,” he decides on, and this Mycroft cannot help but rebut. Sherlock is unfathomable, he is antimatter, anything but ordinary and Lestrade sees his response brewing in the slight downward curve of his lips.

“He’s brilliant,” he says, holding up his hands in surrender. “Of course he is, I know he is. He’s a proper genius, but he’s also an addict, and that makes him a dime a dozen. Heroin is a great equaliser. I don’t care how clever he is, it’ll kill him and he’ll let it.”

Mycroft sucks oxygen from between his teeth. “I am aware of his condition,” he says, not bringing himself to say it out loud, regardless of how many times Lestrade has seen Sherlock strung out in a jail cell, in alley ways. It becomes more real if he says it out loud— far more real than it ever felt when Sherlock pressed a syringe to his skin.

“You’re not,” Lestrade snaps. “You’re clearly not, because instead of putting a stop to it, instead of getting him help, you let him drag you down to his level. Did it help? Did it offer you some kind of insight that you wouldn’t have managed sober?” Mycroft watches as Lestrade’s restlessness gets the better of him, and he stands, pacing around his office, facing the glass windows, blinds drawn. “Well?” He all but snarls, refusing to turn.

“Apologies, I assumed it was a rhetorical question.”

“He’s going to be the end of both of you. And you know what, you won’t be alone. You’ll be statistics, added to a list of fucking brilliant people, wonderful people, who poisoned themselves to death.” He takes a deep breath, the sigh of a man who has watched decades of strangers give themselves over to oblivion. “Get him help. And once he’s sober, talk to him, because I have a feeling you two have a lot more to sort through than the average family.”

—

Sherlock breaks out of rehab after four days. It was intended to be a nine week programme, though Mycroft hardly expected him to last nine hours. He is pleasantly surprised. Mycroft returns to his apartment building in the rain, regretting his decision to leave his umbrella at home. He doesn’t ever choose correctly in London, perhaps he should take after Sherlock and do away with umbrellas all together. He opens the door, conspicuously unlocked, with his hair plastered to his forehead and his slacks dripping onto the floor, to the sound of Sherlock laughing.

“Why don’t you just carry an umbrella on you? You’ll be right sixty percent of the time.”

“I hope you didn’t torment those poor nurses.” He says, hanging his suit jacket on the hall tree and suppressing a shiver.

“Those poor nurses,” Sherlock scoffs. “They wouldn’t even let me have my phone.”

“Why is my window open?” He asks, as a particularly violent gust of wind sends his blinds clicking against the sill.

“It reeked of guilt,” he says, clicking his t’s. “And cowardice.”

Mycroft manages a tight smile, which Sherlock shrugs off like running water and suddenly they are at an impasse. Sherlock never expected Mycroft to actually send him to rehab and Mycroft never expected him to stay. So here they are, in a dark flat growing colder by the minute, with little else to say. Mycroft flips the light switch in the hall and takes refuge in the kitchen, ignoring the way his shirt sticks to his skin, an uncomfortable layer of sodden melange. Sherlock has clearly not been here long— his chaos hasn’t yet spread across his table, milk remains in the fridge, even his tea is untouched.

“I stayed until it was out of my system.” Sherlock is standing in the doorway, framed by the hall light, ethereal. “Seventy eight hours. I’m clean.” He doesn’t move any closer, and for that Mycroft is grateful.

“For now,” he manages.

“I can try, if this is what you want.”

“It should be what you want, Sherlock.” He is nearly shivering now, water drips from his neck, sliding down the path of his spine. He flips the switch on the kettle, and listens to the water hiss and splutter.

“Well it isn’t. I’m perfectly happy to continue doing what I’ve always done.”

“Not always,” he reminds him. Mycroft still remembers Sherlock’s bright eyed smiles, his swords fashioned from fallen oak branches and his invisible, persistent enemies. He claimed to be the villain, Captain Hook against all of Peter’s Lost Boys and all of Tiger Lily’s Indians and yet it was always he who saved Wendy from falling. Mycroft never joined him, but occasionally he watched from above the pages of a paperback as Sherlock saved the day.

Sherlock’s hand covers his, unusually warm against Mycroft’s cold skin, his chest pressed to his back as he delicately removes the kettle from his grip and reaches for a set of mugs. “Go get changed,” he says softly, spooning sugar into one cup and leaving the other empty. “You’ll catch a cold.”

“Rain doesn’t make you sick,” he says absentmindedly, an excuse often visited in their house as children when Sherlock would track in mud from the garden.

Sherlock smiles. “Go get changed,” he repeats, and this time Mycroft listens.

—

He wakes in the middle of the night to Sherlock’s fingers around his throat. He’s not pressing hard, not pressing at all, only holding his hands on either side of his neck, thumbs resting along his windpipe. “I have to admit,” he says softly. “This is not my preferred manner of waking.”

“I’m bored.” There is a hysterical edge to Sherlock’s voice, like he’s been repeating it over and over in his head, trying to keep the words from breaking free and escaping through his teeth. “I’m really bored, bored enough to do something you don’t want me to do.”

In the dark Mycroft cannot see much except for the barest outline of his brother’s body, taught and tense above him, fingers cold and shaking against his skin. “And what would that something be?” He asks. Of course, he knows the answer, a cocktail of narcotics that will bring him ever closer to a fatal overdose. But the hands around his neck have him edging towards the sinister, before Sherlock hisses in annoyance.

“I didn’t mean-“ he pulls away. “I could feel your pulse.” He sounds unsure of himself.

“What would fix it?” He asks, wrapping his arm around Sherlock’s shoulders in an attempt to keep him from running away from them both. “You asked me to kiss you and told me it wouldn’t fix anything. So tell me what would.” Sherlock doesn’t answer, instead he curls into Mycroft’s touch, silent and shifting across the sheets, restless, unable to hold himself still. Every change of position lasts just a little bit longer, until he’s stopped moving altogether save for the delicate rise and fall of his chest, all but invisible were it not for the bottom trace of his rib cage digging into Mycroft’s hip.

Sherlock always has had a beautiful talent for avoiding questions.

—

Mycroft wakes to an empty flat and he feels it like a physical weight, like fluid in his lungs. Not a hint of Sherlock remains, no threads of curled hair nor grimy, discarded undershirts. He is gone just as quickly as he arrived, and Mycroft spends the morning swallowing panic and stomach acid.

He submits a request for surveillance, which he knows his assistant will not document to any official capacity should questions arise. She is so very competent. Preliminary searches come up with nothing, though he expected little. Mycroft has done more than change the game, he’s flipped the table in its entirety, scattering the pieces of their three move chess board to the floor. Mycroft has been playing with a lone king since they were children, Sherlock has never been at a disadvantage.

The consequences of forging paperwork and pushing rehab will be two weeks of silence, followed by tentative outreach as Sherlock weighs the chances of Mycroft showing true resolve— historically unlikely, though one unexpected move paves the way for another. He accepts this, he expects this, but still Mycroft spends his nights listening to every creak wrought from the foundation of his building, and hoping to find Sherlock come morning.

Sometimes, in the precious few minutes before he wakes, when the sky is still dark but for the orange hue of street lamps, he dreams that Sherlock is beside him in bed, whispering into his ear that all is forgiven— every cold look, every ignored phone call, the many birthdays missed and books he refused to read aloud. Sherlock wraps an arm around his waist, and it is healthy and strong, unmarked by bruises or needle scars. His laugh is beautiful and uninhibited.

Sometimes, before he opens his eyes, he forgets it was ever just a dream.

—

Eighteen days pass before Mycroft gives in and calls Lestrade. It’s hardly a logical decision, because if his security team of eleven hand-picked agents haven’t seen hide nor hair of Sherlock, a middle aged, newly promoted Detective Inspector with no higher education certainly isn’t going to work miracles. Regardless, he summons him to the Diogenes, a change of venue from their usual meetings, at five o’clock on a Wednesday.

“So no talking at all, huh?” He asks, after being unceremoniously shoved into Mycroft’s office by an aid in white gloves. “Could’ve given a man some warning.”

“I could hear you yelling from here,” he sighs.

“Well everyone kept shushing me, so I just got louder until somebody answered my question.” Lestrade makes himself comfortable in the leather chair across from his desk, leaning back to stare at the ceiling. “Nice place, though.”

“Sherlock is missing.”

Lestrade allows his head to roll forward, the look he sends Mycroft is skeptical at best. “From rehab?”

“He didn’t last more than four days in rehab, my security team has been unable to locate him for the better part of three weeks.”

Lestrade folds his arms over his chest, chin low, watching. “How many days is the better part of three weeks?”

“Eighteen.” His heart pounds at the admission.

“You haven’t seen Sherlock for eighteen days?”

Mycroft thinks it’s unfair, such reiteration, forcing him to say it, to admit to it, a second time. “Yes,” he whispers, regardless, and Lestrade nods almost absentmindedly.

“I can recruit some help, probably by seven I’ll have-”

“I’m not certain you can do what my people have been unable to manage for weeks.” He says.

Lestrade smiles then, and stands. “Then why did you call me?” He asks, before turning and walking for the door. He doesn’t look back before he leaves, and he doesn’t wait, because they both know Mycroft won’t have an answer.

—

It’s one of many narcotics raids, preformed to boost statistics under an administration that buys into any tough-on-drug lip service that will mollify constituents. They are inefficient and temporary, with full buildings being cleared out in a matter of hours, only to leave them empty for more dealers and coke heads the moment the police tape is torn down. They produce about five convictions a pop, and very little else.

Until a worn-down warehouse outside of Shadwell supplies a recording breaking number of arrests, with footage of cuffed dealers being led off in police cars, four hundred and eighty kilos of cocaine, and one Sherlock Holmes.

He stumbles as Lestrade pushes him down the back steps, with slightly more force than is strictly necessary. “Going to arrest me yourself?” He asks, in a singsong voice, tongue slurred around hard consonants. Lestrade doesn’t answer, so Sherlock continues. “Not shoving it off on a subordinate?”

Lestrade forces Sherlock’s head down as he helps him into the back seat. “Not going to parade me in front of the press like all of the other junkies?”

“No,” Lestrade says, through gritted teeth. He slams the door and takes three deep, calming breaths before climbing into the drivers’ seat.

“Why not?” Sherlock is looking through the partition with a near vindictive grin.

“You mean you can’t tell me?”

Sherlock inclines his head. “I can’t say I’m on my best game, Inspector.”

Lestrade cracks the window before lighting a cigarette through cupped hands. He inhales, refusing to breathe out until his lungs are burning with the effort it takes, until the soft thrum of nicotine is well and truly spread through his arteries. “Your brother’s been worried sick.”

“Oh,” Sherlock whispers. “You can’t seem to get rid of us.”

“No,” he admits, tilting his head to blow a cloud of smoke out the window. “I guess I can’t.”

—

The second Lestrade’s name flashes across the screen of his phone, Mycroft feels the dull ache in his chest increase ten fold. He thinks he might suffocate in the seconds it takes to answer, he might drown. “Yes?”

“We’ve found him,” Lestrade says, sounding very much like he has just spent an unnecessarily long time in Sherlock’s company.

Mycroft allows himself to breathe, once, twice— “Is he alright?”

“Define alright,” Lestrade sighs into the phone. Without waiting for a response, he continues, “he’s uninjured, just got out of medical check. But he’s high as I’ve ever seen him, and is facing a possible distribution charge, add manufacturing to that if the interviews come in against him. So define alright,” he repeats.

“How long until I can post bail?”

“Give it another twelve hours.”

“Thank you,” he whispers. He can hear Lestrade shuffling papers on the other line. Neither of them say goodbye before ending the call.

Twelve hours pass like months. Mycroft doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat. On occasion, he will find himself wrapped in an international incident, involving price fixing between ASEAN states or civil unrest in Nicaragua, and for a blissful few minutes it will be as if Sherlock never existed. But his mind is always too quick to catch up with him. After a moment or two of grace he will remember, and the ever present ache will grow to a near unbearable level, until he takes a deep breath, glances at the clock, and puts his fingers back to the keyboard.

—

“I’m sure you’re so disappointed,” Sherlock spits, vicious and stirring for a fight. His eyes are dark and sunken, the skin around his fingers is bitten raw. Pain has always brought out the worst in Sherlock, and the way he grits his teeth and rolls the taught muscles in his shoulders leaves little doubt of just how well he is taking this sudden brush with sobriety.

Mycroft doesn’t rise to the bait, not even to correct him. Instead he reads over the magistrate's order and takes note of the court date, texting brief instructions to his solicitor.

“Or maybe not,” he continues. “Maybe you don’t give a shit what your brother manages to get himself into as long as it can be dusted under the rug.”

Mycroft doubts this particular offense will be so easy to scrub from the record, though he keeps that to himself. His usual contacts at the Metropolitan are wary of stepping on the toes of the government officials pushing for drug reform; his phone calls have gone largely unanswered. He continues to ignore Sherlock, hoping that he will either ware himself out or the abdominal pain will set in, whichever occurs first— it usually stops him talking.

“Gaining weight again?” He asks, taking a different tactic, baring stained teeth. “Stressful few weeks?”

“The world does not revolve around you, Sherlock,” he answers, refusing to look up from his phone.

“No? I’ll believe you when you start acting like it.” Mycroft nearly smiles. He has a point.

“Where are we going?” His feet tap madly at the carpeted floor, wincing with every minor bump in the road.

“You are to appear before court on the thirteenth,” he pauses. “That’s two and a half weeks. You will spend those two and a half weeks in rehab, and if you leave before then, at any point, you will receive no further help from me, legal, financial or otherwise. That is a promise, Sherlock.” Mycroft turns to look at him. His brother’s eyes are wide, trying to read his hand, call his bluff.

“What if I-“

“Call Lestrade,” he says. “You will have access to a phone for a single hour each day. If you need something, you call Lestrade.”

—

It takes more than three days to clear the physical withdrawal, a process that by some blessing Mycroft is not forced to watch. Instead he receives daily updates from Lestrade, sighed through the receiver while wind howls static in the background. “He thought I was you, today.” He says, sounding hoarse from a combination of cigarettes and late nights. For a moment Mycroft thinks he ought to feel guilty, but it passes as quickly as it came.

“He was hallucinating?”

“Only for a few a minutes. He was talking to me about insects. Well to you. He thought it was you.” He hears the familiar huff of frustration that comes from Lestrade’s attempts to articulate. “Whatever, you know what I mean.”

Sherlock adored insects as a child. Mycroft once returned from school to find a shiny green beetle pinned to his bedside table, still alive, but only just, its legs propelling endlessly in a futile attempt to escape. It was a gift, something beautiful and fascinating in Sherlock’s six year old eyes, something worth giving. “Did he eventually recognise you?” He asks, rubbing at his eyelids.

“Yeah, didn’t try and throw anything at me.” This marks progress from the previous day when Lestrade had called biting off profanities and nursing a bruise from a particularly heavy alarm clock. “Look, I know right now he’s going to have tantrums and accuse you of blackmailing him or some similar bullshit, but it’ll be good for him. In the end, this will help.”

Mycroft contemplates Lestrade’s failing marriage and high stress job and wonders if perhaps he should thank him. He doesn’t.

—

Fourteen weeks of radio silence, and Mycroft thinks he might just go insane. The hollow feeling in his chest, the one he was convinced would fade with time, is persistent and gaping and he hardly sleeps at night unless exhaustion can override the stirring in his heart. It is a rare thing, won from days spent in negotiations, setting his watch to dozens of time zones, delegating nothing. Lestrade is his one link to sanity, though slowly that connection is eroding as well, leaving nothing but scrap metal.

Initially, he called nearly every day. Mycroft wasn’t always there to receive it, but he would leave a message, solemn and irritated, nonetheless. Sherlock is detoxing, Sherlock is being a complete dick, Sherlock kept his mouth shut at the hearing, Sherlock is asking to kip on my sofa, Sherlock solved three cold cases in a single afternoon. His daily calls dwindled to weekly texts, and now either is a rarity. He cannot blame him. Sherlock was the final straw on the back of Lestrade’s marriage, and his life seems to be crumbling with the same, slow, anticlimactic finish as Mycroft’s own.

He knows from his surveillance that Sherlock is doing well. He is surprisingly sober and making a name for himself within the ranks of Lestrade’s force. He even managed to commandeer a lab at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, using it primarily for forensics and the odd gruesome experiment. He is rebuilding. Mycroft is falling apart.

Lestrade calls while he is meeting with the newly appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mycroft holds up a hand for silence, and reaches for the phone.

“Mate, I have had a shit day. Just got chewed out because your bloody brother contaminated a crime scene and now a whole load of physical evidence just turned inadmissible.” Lestrade sounds more than a bit accusatory.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mycroft says, leaning back in his chair.

“You damn well should be. A proper apology would be buying me a drink so I don’t have to go home to your brother putting body parts in the oven.”

“Seven o’clock,” Mycroft says, and Lestrade laughs breathily before hanging up.

He isn’t a particularly difficult man to find. Mycroft pulls up outside a cheap looking pub in Kennington and waves his driver off. The door is blocked by clusters of smokers, holding cigarettes between crooked fingers, standing beneath halos of smoke. He wades through the crowds, until he catches sight of Lestrade’s familiar hunched shoulders and his black rain cloud.

“You look well,” he says, taking the empty seat across from him.

“Fuck you,” he says, though it lacks any real animosity. “You look like hell yourself. Not a fan of sleep these days?” He waves himself off, not bothering to wait for a response. “While it may seem like I called you here to socialise, I really, really didn’t.” Mycroft inclines his head, Lestrade continues, “I have a few bones to pick. First, Sherlock’s looking to move out. Thank the Lord,” he adds, under his breath. “And he’s just useless at coming up with flats. Could you-”

“I’ll have my assistant send a list.”

“Thanks,” Lestrade mumbles into his glass.

“Was that all?”

“Oh, no. I have my own list, beginning with the sulfur stains on my granite counter top,” he sneers. “But first, I wasn’t joking about the alcohol, go on.” He nudges Mycroft towards the bar, shouting his order over his shoulder. “Make it two!”  

—

Mycroft always considered himself ruthless, willing to bleed, to make egregious sacrifices in the name of pride. But with Sherlock, his desperation overrides any natural instinct to fight. He is willing to beg, willing to to bring himself to his knees with an ease he never thought possible. He feels as though he has been locked away for months without a hint of sunlight, and he’ll do absolutely anything for a window.

It is without a single ounce of shame that he repeats Sherlock’s new address through the partition of his town car. He watches dark clouds at sundown transition into the orange haze of light pollution, growing brighter with each block into central London. He knows Sherlock is home from the CCTV cameras off of Baker Street, and there’s no way out of this now.

The knocker is tilted to the right, unpolished brass against a newly painted black door. He knocks three times, before straightening it with a brush of his hand. Martha Hudson, according to her file, small, plain and oddly unimpressionable. Mycroft exudes enough charm to, in his line of work, pass a bill or two between conflicting parties in parliament; but Mrs. Hudson simply waves him off, with a muttered, “oh you’re definitely related to Sherlock, dear. Up the stairs you go.”

“Mrs. Hudson,” Sherlock growls as Mycroft quietly shuts the door behind him. “Weren’t there-“ he stops, watching, as Mycroft shrugs off his coat and makes for the only visible chair in the entire living room. It is strewn with old chemistry textbooks that he is sure his brother outgrew in secondary school, and a collection of brass tea pots that seem oddly familiar to him— nicked from their parents' kitchen, perhaps. He clears everything aside, and takes a seat, watching as Sherlock’s fingers tighten on a florence flask.

“Sherlock,” he says, inclining his head.

“What are you doing here?” He sets the flask down, sending the liquid inside sloshing around the base.

“I haven’t heard a word from you since rehab, I thought I would stop in to see how you were doing.”

“Tired of sicking Lestrade on me?”

Mycroft sees the storm brewing, and does the only thing he can think of to avoid the winds. “I’m sorry.”

Sherlock tilts his head in question, caught in mid-motion, tugging off his surgical gloves, looking at Mycroft with an expression he can’t quite pin down. “For whatever it is I did,” he continues. “I’m sorry. For the manner in which I went about sending you to rehab, for allowing it to get this far,” he waves his hand in a bout of frustration. “For not being a sufficiently affectionate brother when we were children. Christ, Sherlock, whatever it is, I’m sorry.”

Sherlock watches him, unblinking, before he whispers, “I think you should leave.” As always, Mycroft listens.

—

Sherlock’s halfhearted search for a flatmate goes unnoticed by Mycroft, who does his very best to throw himself into his work with a vigor unseen since his first few years out of Oxford. His assistant, rather more forward than he would like, suggests a holiday or perhaps regular exercise as a way to pull himself out of what she fondly refers to as his “slump.” He ignores her, refusing to acknowledge the fact that she had said anything at all, which earns him clipped, cold responses for the better part of two weeks.

He accepts nominations for not one but three separate committees, on top of his usual oversight for Statutory Instruments and National Security Strategy. His fingerprints are spreading, evidence of his gentle sewing, clipping, and pulling of strings. It is enough to guarantee blissful distraction, until he receives a disjointed text from Lestrade, reading, _Sherlock missing serial suicides case._

Mycroft locates Sherlock in a matter of eighteen minutes, but Doctor John Watson finds him first. He watches as they leave the crime scene, smiling through splayed fingers, speaking in hushed, delighted tones. Doctor Watson nudges him in the shoulder, Sherlock’s smile is heartbreakingly genuine. Lestrade is tapping his notepad against his thigh, chewing on the edge of his lip in an uncharacteristic display of indecision.

“Thank you for alerting me,” he says.

Lestrade answers so quickly he nearly cuts him off. “Are you alright?”

Mycroft opens the car door with raised eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t I be?” He gets in without waiting for a response.

—

He returns home from South Korea to find a small, plastic terrarium in the center of his dining room table. The top is an opaque, sky blue; it looks like something a child would carry to fill with caterpillars or paper moths. Among the leaves and heads of pulled flowers there is a shiny green beetle, breathtakingly familiar, clutching a twig with its spiny black legs.

For all of Sherlock’s love for entomology, this beetle is the only one whose genus Mycroft knows by heart. _Cotinis mutabillis_ , a fig beetle, with its iridescent green shell and blood red stomach. Next to it is a scrap of newspaper torn from the Metro with Sherlock’s stunted handwriting listing the names of a dozen flowers, a feeding schedule.

 _Even you can keep a beetle alive for the summer, brother._ It is signed with a simple ’S’ and nothing else. It is an olive branch, an offer of forgiveness, in the only way Sherlock has ever known to express. Except this time, it isn’t pinned, dying, to his bedside table, but offered in a gentle prison of plastic and flower petals.

Mycroft peers through the lid, watching it creep along its many obstacles. He places the terrarium on the windowsill, and in the morning he wakes to the sounds of buzzing, the desperate flapping of useless wings.

—

“He told me once-” Lestrade cuts himself off, clears his throat, stares upwards at the ceiling and looks like he desperately wants to be anywhere else, doing anything but having this conversation. “Right, mate, level with me here. I’m not comfortable talking about this kind of shit, but we’ve reached a bit of a point, you and I.” He gestures at the invisible chasm between them. “He told me he loved you. And I’m thinking he was going for the Borgia Family not the Brady Bunch.”

“Was he high?” Mycroft asks, hoping he sounds uninterested, or at the very least bemused.

“I saw him sober for the first time at one of my crime scenes nine months ago. What do you think?”

“I think you shouldn’t put much stock into the ramblings of an addict.”

“Most addicts, sure. But this is Sherlock, and we both know he’s a bit of an outlier. I just-” he sighs, running a hand through his hair, attempting to look anywhere but at Mycroft. “I wanted to ask if you two were ever,” a flourish of his hand. “A thing. An item, Jesus, whatever. Because this doesn’t look good for either of you, if that’s the kind of relationship you had, him moving in with another bloke I mean.”

“Sherlock never was very good at knowing what it is he wants,” he says, interrupting him before his tangent can get any more hysterical. “No, we were never involved.”

“Involved,” Lestrade says with a laugh. “Knew you’d find a good neutral word for it.” He leans back against his chair, a faint flush developing just above the collar of his shirt. “I’m not going to ask anymore questions about that, alright? We are already miles beyond any kind of normal boundaries, but I do want to tell you that I’ll keep an eye on him, and John Watson seems like a good man.”

Mycroft stands, and forces a smile that wracks his body with the effort it takes to hold. “He does,” he says. “A very good man indeed.”

—

“You’ve been sober for a year,” Mycroft says softly. “I believe a congratulations are in order, to you and Doctor Watson both.”

“Why-” Sherlock begins, but Mycroft cuts him off.

“For his efforts, of course.” He is so very tried. Sherlock has accomplished what he set out to do, nearly two years prior. He has broken the seal to Mycroft’s careful detachment and forced him to live in a world of bitter, unhappy, unrequited depth. It is haunting and painful and he misses his apathy nearly as much as he misses the way his brother’s fingers feel against his skin. Sherlock has broken him for company, only to find a doctor to patch his own mismatched parts. Mycroft has not been so lucky.

“We’re not-” Sherlock begins, his drug fueled confidence gone, replaced with someone almost apologetic, someone he hasn’t been in years and years.

“Yes I am aware. He is so staunchly,” he raises his eyebrows, tits his mouth, “‘not gay.’”

“Even if he were,” Sherlock snaps, a bit of his viciousness bleeding its way back into his voice. “We wouldn’t be fucking.”

“So crude,” Mycroft says with a tilt of his head. “I was going to say lovers.”

Sherlock scoffs, but looks away, like the word itself makes him uncomfortable. His fingers dance across the arm of his chair like phantom piano keys, anxiety laced up the line of his forearm. His violin lay silent in his lap. “He’s a friend.” He sounds very much like he is trying to convince them both. “Why not mention Lestrade then?”

“He doesn’t have quite the same effect on you,” Mycroft says, standing. “Regardless, congratulations.”

Sherlock reaches for him in a desperate lunge, and clasps his hand around Mycroft’s wrist, just above his cufflinks, fingers digging and painful. Mycroft turns, and Sherlock watches him silently, eyes moving in patterns of chaos, searching every inch of him for an answer Mycroft doesn’t think he possesses. “I never meant for this to happen,” he whispers.

Instead of denying it, he only smiles and says, “I know.” Mycroft watches Sherlock pull away— fingers tightening around the neck of his violin, bow abandoned beside the chair— and resigns himself to this.

Sherlock may have beaten his addiction, but Mycroft never will.


	2. Chapter 2

It is a feeling he recognises but never could put a name to. Even after years of syringes and track marks and dishes shattered against drywall he has never once come up with a name. Fear he knows, in the biological if not the poetic— adrenalin, a high like a minor explosion among the hydrogen bombs of heroin. Boredom he knows as well, better than he ought to, which brings him right around to the noose of desperation. 

But it is none of those. If anything, he feels like a child again; there’s something he’s missing, and his questions will come to nothing but a pat on the head and a promise that he’ll understand when he’s grown. He feels the bitter wedge of frustration rise from his throat, vindicated by a hint of anger. He feels sad, but then again he doesn’t think he’s ever felt very happy. 

“Oh, you’re still in.” John carries a grocery bag in one hand, a newspaper in the other. His eyes pass over Sherlock and he smiles blandly, sees nothing. Sherlock envies him in a way he never has with Lestrade. Lestrade shares his unthawing, bone deep melancholy, but John is as warm as he is blind.

“I thought you had somewhere to be,” John says from the kitchen, elbow deep in the freezer. “Something about the morgue.” 

“I do.”

“Well you don’t look like it.” He gestures at his dressing gown, hanging open in a single silk flow. 

“I do,” he repeats, shrugging off his dressing gown and flinging it over his chair. Sherlock toes on his shoes, glances around for his coat, and shuts the door without saying goodbye. 

Lestrade is still in his office when he arrives, sitting across from a young, thin-lipped constable with bright, bright eyes. Sherlock knows that today was his first visit to a crime scene. He knew well before Lestrade’s near imperceptible shake of his head, and not from the mud on his shoes or the creases in his uniform but from the distant, desperate look on his face. 

“Leave,” he says to the constable, gesturing towards the door. Lestrade growls his name like a curse and smiles kindly at the boy in the same breath. 

“We’ll speak more tomorrow. It’s probably best you take the night.” His voice is calm and gentle and reassuring. Sherlock heard that voice once, whispered to him through the haze of withdrawal. He can’t remember the words. 

The boy nods and heads towards the door, glancing back at Lestrade with wide, haunted eyes. He smiles encouragingly, and Sherlock shuts the door behind him. 

“What do you want?” Lestrade asks, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers over his stomach. His voice is no longer gentle but he doesn’t sound angry either. Sometimes Sherlock wonders if he might have a very finite tolerance for the Holmes family, a quota that just hasn’t yet been filled.

He allows himself to fiddle with the buttons on his coat as his heels tap against the floor in an uncoordinated show of discontent. “You told me to forget about it and move on.” 

Lestrade may be blind to the many clues of a crime scene, but he never misses a detail when it comes to the spider web of human emotions. He follows Sherlock’s logic without missing a single silk thread. “Yeah, and you told me your brother was as good as a psychopath.”

“What if we were both wrong?”

“Well I know you were,” Lestrade says. “I knew you were wrong the second you said it. I’d met the man, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“He could be an extraordinarily good actor.”

“Not when it comes to you,” he says. “And I cannot even tell you how badly I don’t want to talk to you about this. I thought you’d taken my advice. You know-“ he inclines his head towards the door, eyebrows raised.

“What,” Sherlock snaps. “You think it’s just that easy, don’t you?” He forces himself to exhale. “You live in a world where you could simply walk down the street and meet another person with enough potential to make you happy. I cannot be that way, I can’t ever be that way because there is no other single person who can-“ he gestures angrily around his temple. “Who has this. There is no one else. John is someone who’s company I have come to tolerate if not appreciate but he will only ever understand me in partialities. He is not-“ Sherlock swallows, cutting himself off, and as much as he hates to look away, he hates the expression on Lestrade’s face more.

“He’s not Mycroft?” Lestrade offers. The voice is back; prompting and kind. Sherlock hates it. 

“He thinks I’ve fallen in love,” he spits the word like venom, disgusted with its connotations, and avoids Lestrade’s eyes by focusing on the hem of his leather gloves.

“I’m not surprised.” He doesn’t say anything else. Sherlock knows what he’s doing and he hates that too.

“I don’t want to go back to how I was.”

“You’re doing very well,” Lestrade agrees. “I’m really proud of you, Sherlock.” He says it with unwavering confidence, but the tips of his ears are red and the skin above his collar is two shades too dark. 

“What if he loves me?” He asks.

“Of course he loves you.”

Sherlock glares at him and Lestrade shreds the skin of his lips with his fingernails. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah mate, I do. But it’s not-” 

“He kissed me once,” he says, cutting him off. It’s a beautiful memory. Sometimes he replays it over and over behind closed eyelids, a small production of lips and teeth and breathy sighs.

Lestrade groans into his hands. “I am not your couples therapist.” His voice his muffled by his shirtsleeves. 

“Well you played the role all the same. I followed your advice, and look where it got me.”

“Sober,” Lestrade points out. 

Sherlock wants to add “and alone” but it feels petty and self indulgent to his own ears, and so he keeps his mouth shut until Lestrade returns to his paper work and gestures towards the door. 

—

Time has a tendency to soften memories, add a hint of silver lining, brighten colours, buff out the shadows. Mycroft once commented on it idly over a conversation with their uncle, while Sherlock crouched under the piano, taking apart their cousin’s wristwatch. “A defense mechanism” he had said, no different than shock or adrenaline. Sherlock sometimes wonders if his memory is responsible for the incessant, lasting sense of calamity— because Sherlock remembers everything. 

He remembers the bitter cold of the pond that he slipped into when he was five; the water was littered with bits of cracked ice, it hurt his chest to breathe. He remembers every time Mycroft returned home from boarding school, the minor changes in his height, the lines on his face, the hollows of his cheeks. He remembers the horrible sensation of greeting his brother and seeing him as a stranger. He remembers every child who hated him, a far more substantial number than any who were ever kind. He remembers the first time he tried heroin, in vivid, beautiful technicolor. 

The only gaps in his memory surface from drug use or the conscious decision to purge facts. Trivia he can get rid of, but Sherlock can never manage to forget people.

When Mycroft returned home from university for winter holidays, it had been nearly two years since he’d seen him last. Sherlock did not exactly flourish in boarding school as his brother had, and he was in between sixth forms while Mycroft breezed through Oxford. 

He came through the door in a suit, fitted and trimmed, kissing their mother on the cheek and smiling blandly at Sherlock where he sat sprawled across the sofa with a chemistry book. He looked uninterested and Sherlock remembers swallowing a knot in his throat, but it passed as quickly as it came, back into his stomach, easily ignored. It wasn’t until dinner, that he saw it— the exasperated looks as their father fumbled through the political arguments of the day, the thinly veiled sarcasm that his parents mistook for agreement. When Mycroft caught his eye across the table, he smiled, barely noticeable, a silent communication between the two. 

Lying in bed that night, Sherlock realised he was not alone. Mycroft was just like him, only he was better at hiding it. He had spent years conditioning himself to accept the solitude that had plagued him as a child, embrace it, realise that this world was not for him. He was better off with nitrogen and electrons, unstable and unpredictable. 

Sherlock spent many years convinced that he was alone, and it’s that smile that haunts him the most. He remembers every second of that dinner, he cherished the realisation that there was someone else out there that could understand the chaos in his head. 

He remembers in just as much detail how Mycroft looked when he walked away, when he returned to university without so much a backward glance. He remembers the messages that went unanswered, noncommittal hums murmured into receivers on the rare occasions that he returned his calls. 

Sherlock thought he was above acting out for attention, but heroin is terribly effective. He nearly always smiles at the memory of Mycroft standing frozen in the doorway, watching his every move, flinching when the needle broke his skin.

“We’re here,” the cabbie says, watching wearily through the rear view mirror, and the spell is broken. 

He unlocks the door to 221B feeling suddenly moody, frustrated, with the bite of something that feels vaguely like guilt, though he ignores that bit by kicking off his shoes and slamming his bedroom door. John shouts a muffled, “well that was unnecessary” from the sitting room. 

He curls up on his bed, still in his coat and gloves, and looks up at the periodic table on his wall. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium. His head spins.

Mycroft has never been an open book. Sometimes, he thinks his brother possesses the capacity for infinite patience, other times he swears that something dark lurks behind his irises— something uncaring, a perfect mimic of humanity. It showed on rare occasions during their childhood, like when their grandfather died and he brought a calculus book to tuck in between pages of a hymnal at his funeral. But when Mycroft looks at him, Sherlock knows that for all of the darkness, there exists a light, even if it’s just the flicker of a candle and a flame that burns only for him. 

Now that they are both begrudging adults, Mycroft will never deny him anything. That is nearly worse than the indifference. 

He sighs, rolls over, and reaches into his pocket for his mobile. Mycroft’s phone is set to speed dial, number seven, as he is unwilling to face John’s ridicule should he ever discover his brother’s number set to one. 

It rings twice. “I’ve only just left,” Mycroft sighs through the receiver. “Surely you haven’t gotten into any trouble in that amount of time.” He sounds tired. Or perhaps Sherlock has it wrong, and he sounds bored or worried or none of the above.

“Send someone to Baker Street,” he says. The thought sends a sudden jolt of adrenaline through his system, his heart beats just a half a second faster, and Sherlock hates himself for it. “Send someone to pick me up.”

Mycroft is silent on the other end, without the shifts or sighs or the whispers of paper work that he is used to hearing from Lestrade. “Why don’t you take a cab?”

“No money for the fare.” 

“What is it you want, Sherlock?”

“To stay the night.” He has a feeling that he didn’t answer Mycroft’s question at all. 

“Very well. Expect a car within the hour.”

—

Mycroft’s town house in Kensington is decorated like a diplomat’s, without a single touch of personality. Sherlock is sure his assistants put it all together, adjusting every framed painting, planting marks of British patriotism. Mycroft’s childhood room was Spartan, though Sherlock rarely ever caught a glance through the door before he left for school. After that, it was ripped of anything that resembled Mycroft’s taste, redecorated and replaced with framed diplomas and achievements, bare except for a desk and chest of drawers. 

“It’s too warm in here,” he comments idly, unsure of what else to say. He eyes the fire in the grate, grimaces at the dry heat.

“You always think it’s too warm,” he says. Mycroft is taking his time over a crystal cut decanter and a bottle of Port wine. Perhaps he’s stalling, nervous. More likely, he’s winding down from a day of planned espionage and tedious pleasantries. “Unfortunately, I never did have your warm blood.”

It feels like a metaphor. Sherlock is busy parsing every word, over analyzing the slightest movement of his brother’s fingers. It’s exhausting. “Can you please just sit down?” he snaps finally, biting at the dry skin on his bottom lip. 

Mycroft tilts his head a fraction of an inch and complies with a bemused smirk.

“And stop looking at me like that,” Sherlock leans forward, presses his fingers into his eyes and watches stars explode in lines of white. “Christ,” he breathes. 

“Sherlock, honestly-” Mycroft begins, looking like he is about to stand again, to walk over to the fireplace and inspect the mantle. It’s his toned down, practiced substitute for pacing. 

“No.” Sherlock grabs his arm hard, hard enough to leave little white indentations of the pads of his fingers against Mycroft’s skin, fleeting marks he wishes he could make permanent. “I was obsessed,” he says, a little breathless, ignoring the sting of hurt pride because he knows Mycroft hears it. “Having someone that understood me was all I could think about. I wanted it more than anything, I wanted you more than anything. But Lestrade dragged me through weeks of withdrawal and told me to get over myself. He understands me a little bit, and John understands some things too, and for now I can live with that. I can live with it,” he repeats, desperate. 

He lets go, and Mycroft stays in his chair. “It’s not what I want though.”

“What do you want?” He looks passive, his mouth tucked into the smallest of frowns. For a second Sherlock doubts himself.

“I don’t want to go back to living for you.” It’s horrible, basing everything you are on another person, sewing yourself into the fragile walls of a heart that can stop beating at any moment, that can tear itself from you without a wound, without a scar. 

Mycroft watches him carefully, and as if in response to the swirl of his thoughts says, “It’s all I’ve ever known.” 

“That’s not true though,” Sherlock snaps, his petulance wearing through, an effect only Mycroft and his mother seem to have— reverting him to a stubborn seven year old. “You left so easily. You wanted nothing to do with me for years.”

“I didn’t know what to do with you,” Mycroft corrects him. “And when I finally did, I thought it might be best if you fell outside my scope of influence. I’m not a terribly good role model when it comes to norms, and you have a tendency to sequester yourself at the very hint of an ally.” He smiles. “You needed to make friends.” 

“Well I’ve done that,” he says. “I’ve made friends. I have John, and Lestrade. I let Molly buy me coffee sometimes. Mrs. Hudson kisses me on the cheek.” 

“I’m happy for you.” He doesn’t sound it. Not that Sherlock would know what happy sounded like, coming from Mycroft. They are like a perfect matching set of broken china. 

“I don’t understand what you want from me,” he says finally. His hands are cold, his fingers numb, like the wash of adrenaline but worse, becoming painful in the seconds it takes Mycroft to turn and look at him. 

“That makes two of us.” Mycroft reaches for his untouched glass of Port, and Sherlock envies his steady hands. “You’re always pushing, Sherlock. I don’t know what you’re looking to do once you’re out of boundaries to break. I thought maybe-“

“You thought wrong,” Sherlock says, remembering Lestrade’s raised eyebrows. “John tolerates me-”

“He adores you,” Mycroft corrects him, studying his glass.

“Then I tolerate him. It’s irrelevant, it doesn’t matter,” he bites out between gritted teeth. 

“Why did you come here tonight?”

“To apologise,” he says, though it’s not entirely true. The guilt was mostly in retrospect, with a bit of Lestrade’s gentle prodding. “For the drugs, for dragging you into it. I didn’t intend for it to go that far.”

“I’ve worked that much out on my own, Sherlock.” Mycroft is watching the fire now. It lights up his face in hues of red and yellow, darkens the lines around his eyes to swaths of black. It doesn’t suit him.

“I appreciate what you and Lestrade did.” 

Mycroft smiles. “I rather wish I had a recording of that.”

“Did you kiss me because I asked you to, or because you wanted to?” 

Mycroft’s hand stops midway to his mouth, and it’s the first sign of their shared weakness Sherlock has seen all night. “Does it matter?” He asks finally.

“Yes.”

“Because you asked me.”

Sherlock nods. The heat from the fire is becoming overwhelming, his skin itches with desperation. 

“The wanting came after.” 

He looks to the side, watching. “I can’t tell when you’re lying,” he admits. 

“I know.” Mycroft sips his Port and Sherlock watches him swallow. “For what it’s worth, I don’t often lie to you. I’ve never felt the need.”

“I’m not in love with John,” he whispers. 

“Could you be?” Mycroft asks, looking him in the eye for the first time since he walked through the door. “One day?”

“How can you even ask that?” He snaps.

“Because as much as you wish to believe otherwise, you and I are not the same person. You’re brash, and a bit blind to social cues-” Sherlock huffs in annoyance, “but you have far more of a heart than you give yourself credit for. I imagine if you allowed it love could fit just as easily into your life as your experiments and cold cases.”

“And you’re saying I can’t have that with you?” Sherlock feels slightly sick to his stomach. He watches Mycroft set his glass on the small table between them and nearly gags at the smell of alcohol. 

“You have the potential for, if not normality, something reminiscent of happiness. No, I don’t think you’d find that with me. If I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t think you want to. It is either the thrill of the chase or something you convinced yourself of while you were still a child.” Mycroft sounds bitter, like he’s airing fears he’s kept festering for months. 

“And if you’re wrong?”

“I so rarely am.” He sighs. 

Sherlock pushes himself up, slides a hand over the arm of Mycroft’s chair, approaches him like a predator. Mycroft doesn’t look particularly worried about being cornered, he stares over Sherlock’s shoulder and into the fire. He doubts himself for the hundredth time as he presses his fingers to the underside of Mycroft’s wrist. His skin is cool to the touch. He remembers Irene Adler with sudden, uninvited clarity; _I’ll be delicate._

“I might not know when you’re lying, but-” 

Mycroft runs his fingers down Sherlock’s jaw line, cutting him off. He almost pulls away out of a mixture of shock and instinct at the sudden touch. “This was never about me,” he says. He eyes are locked on Sherlock’s lips, his own curved into the makings of a wistful smile. “I adore you,” he whispers, pushing his hand back through Sherlock’s hair, watching with reverence as he automatically tilts his head at the touch. “I always have, I always will. This isn’t about me,” he repeats. 

Every response he could manage, every argument, every promise that what Sherlock feels is genuine runs through his head in a roar of syllables. Sherlock kisses him instead. 

Mycroft’s responds immediately, parting his lips, cupping his jaw, breathing him in. It is nothing like their first kiss. Sherlock is hyper aware of every movement, of the hand hooked behind his neck, Mycroft’s thumb rubbing hypnotic circles across his nape. Sherlock clambers onto his lap, knees resting on either side of Mycroft’s thighs. They both breathe in, once, deeply, before pulling each other together again in a desperate, heady kiss. It is not elegant or dignified. 

Sherlock is rubbing Mycroft through his trousers as their tongues slide together. Mycroft tugs Sherlock’s shirt free of his slacks and his cold fingers skate across the flat of his stomach, his ribs, his thumbs brushing across his nipples as he sucks a mark into the skin below his jaw. Sherlock pulls away, just for a moment, and the look on Mycroft’s face is one he has never seen before, a horrified mixture of heartbreak and confusion. He would erase it if he could; delete it entirely from his memory.

“No, I’m not-“ Sherlock pins Mycroft’s wrists down and nuzzles at his temple. “I just wanted to say that this isn’t lust. I’m not doing this for the sex. I know you don’t-“ he shakes his head. “I want you. Just you.” 

Mycroft’s relief is audible, his chest caves into a sigh. “Sex,” he says, his voice unsteady. Sherlock feels the barest hint of victory. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, little brother.” He grinds his hips up against him, and Sherlock gasps into his mouth. 

“Don’t make me threaten you.” Sherlock is smiling when he catches Mycroft’s earlobe between his lips, applies the gentle pressure of teeth and listens to Mycroft sigh. “Does this mean you believe me?”

“Maybe,” Mycroft breathes into his hair. “But maybe I’m just tired of denying myself.” 

“It’s a start.” Sherlock is tugging at Mycroft’s waistcoat, frustrated by the stiff, gypsum buttons. Mycroft brushes his hands away, and undoes them himself with practiced ease. While Sherlock helps him shrug off his jacket, he continues, “the rest will come.”

“You sound so sure,” Mycroft murmurs against the hollow of his throat. He had begun the task of divulging Sherlock of his shirt, but quickly became distracted by running his tongue along his collarbones. 

“You’re the one that’s doubting, brother.” His lifts Mycroft’s face to his, kissing him once more. “And I don’t blame you.”

Mycroft opens his mouth to respond but Sherlock nips at his bottom lip and presses and hand to his chest. “Enough talking. You’re ruining this for me.” Mycroft laughs, a beautiful, carefree sound. 

— 

“Sherlock.” Mycroft’s voice is deep and broken from sleep. Sherlock cannot fathom why he could possibly be attempting to wake him at what must be a God forsaken hour of the morning, so he rolls over and ignores him. “Sherlock,” he says again, this time accompanied by the buzzing of his mobile. “He’s called you four times.”

He groans, cracking an eye open. “John?” He asks, turning to face him. Mycroft looks thoroughly debauched. His hair is mussed at stubborn angles, held by the gel he used to keep it tame. Bite marks litter his right shoulder, his lips still look just a touch swollen. Sherlock runs his tongue along his bottom lip, only to be pulled back by Mycroft shaking his phone in front of his eyes.

“Lestrade,” he says.

“Well you could have just answered it yourself.” 

Mycroft snorts and falls back against the pillows in a beautifully undignified slouch as Sherlock picks up the phone. “What,” he snaps, threading a little more venom into his voice than he strictly feels at the moment. His attachment to sleep has been abandoned in favor of the line of freckles along Mycroft’s back. 

“Where are you? John told me you didn’t come home last night, I was worried you-“ Lestrade cuts himself off and Sherlock trails a finger down his brother’s spine.

“I’m with my brother.” Mycroft pushes himself up onto his elbows, sending Sherlock an incredulous look, which he ignores. 

Lestrade doesn’t answer, so Sherlock shifts against Mycroft’s side, pushing him back down against the sheets. Mycroft looks ready to snatch the phone out of his hand and hurl it against the wall when Lestrade finally says, “Oh.” 

“I’m not taking any manner of narcotics, hallucinogens, uppers, downers-“

“Yeah, I get the point.” Lestrade snaps, but he sounds more relieved than anything. “After last night, I just wanted to check up on you, that’s all.”

“I’m fine.” He says, hooking his calf around Mycroft’s knee. 

“Good. That’s good. Well I’ll-”

“Good bye, Lestrade.”

“Yeah, that’s. Bye.”

Mycroft groans as Sherlock tosses the phone on the bedside table and presses himself against him. “Well that wasn’t exactly subtle.”

“Lestrade is privy to nearly every skeleton you or I have hidden away in our respective closets.” He licks a line across Mycroft’s neck, tasting sweat, sex, and chemical cologne. “It’s a little late for propriety.” 

“Besides,” he continues, curling his fingers in the light dust of hair along Mycroft’s navel. “Better in bed with you than high on the streets.”

“I’m not certain Lestrade would agree. He’s made clear his discomforts.” 

“He would definitely agree.” Mycroft sighs at his touch. “Not that I particularly care.”

Mycroft hums in agreement and Sherlock kisses him. 

—

“Welcome home.” John is in the kitchen, his back to him, shoulders tense. He spent the weekend and then some at Mycroft’s side. He woke every morning to Mycroft’s lips against the nape of his neck, and he fell asleep every night to the rhythmic beat of his brother’s heart. They spent evenings draped across the couch, while Sherlock did his best to prove his sincerity with his teeth and lips and tongue. On Monday, when Mycroft returned to work, he remained in bed among their stained sheets, drifting in and out of sleep and basking in the relative silence of his cluttered mind. 

He hangs his coat on the peg in the hall, and slips off his scarf, thankful at least that Mycroft left every mark below the collar, a courtesy Sherlock himself did not extend. “Thank you,” he says evenly.

“Lestrade called me worried sick over you.” He’s leaning in the doorway now, arms crossed, eyes stormy, a dark grey. “He thought you might be using.”

“Well I wasn’t.” 

“Why would he think that Sherlock?” He asks, pushing himself upright, taking a few steps closer. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. It’s Lestrade, when have you ever known him to be right about a hunch?” 

“Where were you?” 

“At my brother’s house.”

“Oh.” John steps back, his anger sheared, only to be replaced with confusion. 

“Case,” he says waving a hand in dismissal. 

John allows him to retreat back into his room without another word. Sherlock collapses backwards onto his bed, closes his eyes, and thinks of the way Mycroft smiled at him that morning, the feeling of his suit against Sherlock’s bare chest, his soft laugh when Sherlock pulled him back down onto the bed. 

With an annoyed huff, Sherlock pulls out his phone.

“Lestrade,” he snaps. “I need a case.” 

—

Sherlock’s life is not turned upside-down. In aggregate, it’s not really all that different. He still spends days on end working cases without sleep, sweeping through Lestrade’s crime scenes, picking apart human appendages in the kitchen. John still opens the microwave with groans of disgust or frustration, he’s never quite sure which. He still has nights where he wants nothing more than morphine, cocaine, fentanyl. Some nights it’s back to heroin. He still hides cigarettes in innocuous places within 221B, John still digs through his sock drawer when he’s out for more than a day at a time. 

The differences are small ones. He doesn’t feel like he’s on the outside looking in, doesn’t often think his heart will burst from his chest with the emotion he can’t put a name to. He still works himself to exhaustion, but now instead of collapsing on top of his own sheets, he takes a cab to Mycroft’s house— uses a key instead of picking the locks— and curls under his duvet, knowing he will wake with Mycroft at his side. 

His days aren’t saturated with affection, as he had once worried an arrangement like this would require. In fact, Mycroft seems to keep him an emotional arm’s length away, except for the very earliest hours of the morning when Sherlock wakes to whispered confessions into the nape of his neck, words he can never quite make out. Instead of exchanging romantic sentiment, Mycroft sends bare bone cases via text for Sherlock to solve with the pads of his fingertips and likely they both prefer it that way. Sherlock still fights him on government case work though, procrastinating or sending John in his stead, which tends to end with his wrists tied to the headboard and Mycroft’s teeth against his thighs. 

Lestrade pretends he doesn’t notice any of these things, but he stops calling to check up on him all the same. 

His chaotic, deafening thoughts remain more or less unchecked without copious drug use or a constant stream of work. When neither are readily available, he doesn’t fall apart, doesn’t collapse in on himself like a degenerate star. Instead he writes Mycroft, who responds with whatever office he is holed up in at the time. 

Sometimes, they share cigarettes. Mycroft presses his fingers to Sherlock’s lips as he inhales. Sometimes they’re proper Marlboro Blues other times they’re black wrapped clove, which causes Sherlock to laugh around clouds of smoke. Sometimes Mycroft kisses him, breathes him in, while Sherlock’s mind fizzles and spits like wet logs in a fire. Other times they sit pressed side by side, and discuss the Millennium Prize Problems, equations neither could ever hope to solve, and the impossibility of the Riemann hypothesis comforts him. Sometimes Mycroft scratches equations against the skin of Sherlock’s palm in demonstration with blue ink, and in lieu of actual paper, they’ll extend their work all the way up Sherlock’s forearm. 

He never thanks him for days like those, though he doesn’t need to. Mycroft understands. 

— 

“You’ve been away a lot,” John comments one day, peering over the edge of his newspaper as Sherlock flicks at the keys of his laptop. It is an icy, wet December, and Sherlock has spent many nights curled against Mycroft between Egyptian cotton sheets while John braves the drafts of Baker Street. 

“Cases,” he mumbles, keeping his eyes fixed on the florescent blue of his computer screen. He thinks of texting Mycroft. He’s in the mood for Lebanese. 

“Oh, here I thought you might be spending time with someone.” John’s face has broken out into a smug, inset grin. Sherlock resents it, and curls tightly into his chair, balancing the computer on his knees. He has been the epitome of subtle, and how dare John insinuate otherwise. 

“Just work,” he says through gritted teeth. John drops it, only for the smirk to return when Sherlock collects his coat later that evening and announces that he has an appointment to keep. 

“Sure you do.” John tucks his chin against his chest, trying not to laugh. Sherlock growls in annoyance, and sweeps out the door. 

The car Mycroft sent for him drives right past their favourite Lebanese restaurant, a family run joint from Clapham which gained so much popularity that it blessedly opened a shop just north of Chelsea. When they pull up in front of the white stone steps of his brother’s town house, Sherlock assumes that he has lost the night to the British Nation. 

He finds Mycroft in the living room, sporting reading glasses and shirtsleeves, his laptop perched in front of him, a stack of files to the side. He looks up at Sherlock, smiling apologetically, and motions to the small collection of plastic bags on the coffee table. It smells like lentils and lamb. Sherlock wants to step over the table and kiss him until he cannot breathe, until they’re both left gasping. 

“They don’t do takeout,” he says, peering into the first bag.

“They made an exception. As I hoped you would.” There are two plates set out, heavy, gold trimmed china, with matching silverware, napkins folded into right triangles. “It will be a few hours.” 

Sherlock sets to opening the plastic containers, thick tupperware he recognises from Mycroft’s kitchen. He spoons a decent helping of lentils onto his own plate, adding kibbeh and aubergine to Mycroft’s. He sits beside him, balancing his brother’s plate on top of the files to his left, with a rather pointed look. Mycroft smiles, and reaches over to kiss him with slow, lingering touches. Sherlock finds himself rather breathless as Mycroft returns to his computer screen, reading glasses slipping down the edge of his nose.

“What was that for?” He asks through a mouthful of rice and lentils. 

“It was a hello.” Mycroft shifts his plate, untouched, and pulls a sheet of paper from the third file. “And an apology.”

“Can I help?” He leans against his brother’s side. 

“Nothing interesting, I’m afraid. Trade negotiations finalise between Japan and the remaining signatory members of the TPP tomorrow evening. I need the projection reports finished before then.”

“Don’t you have bureaucrats for that?” Sherlock rests his temple against Mycroft’s arm, feeling every shift and shutter as his fingers fly across the keys. “Also,” he presses a kiss to the tip of his shoulder blade. “The United Kingdom is not a member of the TPP. We aren’t even affiliated. That’s an American project.”

“Yes well,” Mycroft begins with a sigh, adjusting his glasses with a brush of his hand. “The Department of Commerce requested a consultant. And what they really needed was someone to redo all of their figures.”

Sherlock smiles. “First you’re loaned out to the CIA, now Washington. I can’t tell if it’s a promotion or something worse.”

“Far worse,” Mycroft says. “At least the CIA is semi-competent. And when I say semi, I am being generous.”

Sherlock reaches across Mycroft’s chest and picks up his plate. He cuts through a croquette with the side of his fork, stabbing a reasonably sized piece and holding it expectantly in front of Mycroft’s mouth. He looks down, eyebrows raised. 

“That’s hardly necessary.”

Sherlock practices his very best impression of disbelief and Mycroft rolls his eyes. “This might be the most hypocritical thing you’ve ever done. Need I remind you of your instance on fasting whilst on cases?” He grudgingly takes a bite, though this too may be feigned. He never could resist kibbeh. 

“I’m not on a case now.” Sherlock picks distastefully through the aubergine. 

Mycroft stops typing. The silence is loud enough to draw Sherlock away from his meticulous dissection of Mycroft’s plate. He raises his head to find him looking down at him, an unreadable expression on his face. 

“What,” he snaps. 

He leans down, and brushes his lips against the crown of Sherlock’s head. “It’s nothing,” he says, smiling. “I’m just glad you came.” 

Sherlock’s chest is tight, a new feeling he cannot name, to slot alongside fear, boredom, desperation, frustration, and anger. It feels like Ecstasy, without the drug induced haze, or adrenaline without the nerves and numbing extremities. Mycroft runs his fingers through his hair, and whispers something inaudible against his curls, and Sherlock feels certain that gravity has betrayed him, pushing his heart up towards his throat. He doesn’t know what to say, or how to react to Mycroft’s curious smile, so he picks up a piece of kibbeh with his fingers and shoves it into his brother’s mouth.


End file.
